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Skylake1

Intel's Skylake-10 platform launched this week, with back up for Kaby Lake and Skylake HEDT CPUs ranging from ten-core fries bachelor on June 26 to an 18-core processor that'll be available in Oct. We're still working on our review, but the overall performance level of the new CPUs looks fairly solid. There'due south ane of import thing to go along in listen, however: High core count CPUs, generally speaking, are non the best gaming chips you lot tin purchase.

That's the decision PC Gamer came to during their work testing the new Skylake-X, and it'southward a conclusion we'd generally agree with based on our tests of previous Intel CPUs. It'southward not that you can't game on HEDT chips — in fact, we've seen swell results from both Ryzen vii and the Cadre i7-6900K and then far this year. But these cores are fundamentally designed to be workstation products and aren't solely focused on gaming.

Here's the bones issue: Jump back 10 years, and you'll notice plenty of multi-threaded software. But nigh of it was confined to professional markets rather than focusing on the consumer space. Consumer software that was multithreaded, meanwhile, tended to exist dual-threaded or quad-threaded at near. If professional applications like Maya, 3ds Max, HPC software, and video rendering workloads accept tended to be at the forefront of adopting multi-core support, games have lagged behind by a significant margin.

Many titles now support quad cores readily enough, only scaling above that point has been anemic, for several reasons. First, game developers tend to optimize for the about common usage scenarios, and well-nigh laptops are still dual-core systems. In fact, the split up on Steam shows that while quad-core chips have a small advantage overall, a huge chunk of the market place is still on ii physical CPUs (some of these volition be Hyper-Threading-capable Core i3s, but not all of them).

PhysicalCPUs

Data from Steam's Hardware Survey, May 2022

It's long been known that game developers optimize software for a broad range of GPUs, to ensure that games can run properly on the largest amount of hardware possible. But optimizing for CPUs is important, as well. With AMD now offering six-core / 12-thread fries far below Intel's price points and quad-core / eight-thread chips for ~$169, nosotros should beginning to encounter more than support for these additional threads, but it's going to be a slow ramp.

That's not to say there aren't benefits to running more CPU cores that aren't necessarily picked up in gaming benchmarks. I recently moved and spent several weeks using a dual-core + HT laptop equally my daily driver rather than my half-dozen-core desktop. While information technology's truthful that the laptop handled well-nigh everything with aplomb, there were definitely times when I had to alt-tab out of a game or intensive programme to kill apps that were stealing CPU cycles and slowing the machine downward in ways that only weren't a trouble on my more than powerful desktop. There can be a benefit to running college core counts, even if you aren't using them all for gaming — they help you juggle other tasks simultaneously.

Just that said, we'd nevertheless recommend striking a balance between higher clock speeds and thread counts if you want to game, as opposed to leaping for the most expensive HCC processors on the market place. Don't assume that more cores always equals faster functioning — and given the relatively irksome charge per unit at which games have added additional cadre support, don't count on this all of a sudden changing in the next few years. DirectX 12 does offer some unique options for taking advantage of additional CPU resource, but it's still going to be a few years before we see games targeting that API (and its capabilities) as a primary focus. DX11 and DX9 support have a large marketplace presence and that'll take time to supervene upon.